Grant: Chair: Gender, Work and Health - Implementation Systems

Canadian workplaces need to step up to the challenge of managing a workforce which is, due to health care restructuring, increasingly expected to provide unpaid caregiving to family members. The program of research in gender, work and health proposed builds on work underway by the applicant, specific to caregiver friendly workplaces. Framed within gender relations theory, this research program examines the interface between unpaid caregiving work and paid labour, recognizing that the role strain across these two entities causes ill-health for caregiver employees (CEs). Although the gender construct is of most importance to this research program, given the gendered nature of unpaid caregiving, the term sex/gender will be employed throughout the research program recognizing the manifestation of the combination of the biological and social elements of sex and gender, respectfully(unless otherwise explicitly operationalized). Six interconnected projects in one of two streams [1.Caregiver Friendly Workplaces (4 projects), and 2.Intersectionality Analysis of Caregiver-Employees (2 projects)] make up the research program and are relevant to three of the identified partners: IGH, IPPH, and CCOHS, given the focus on: sex/gender, work and health (physical, psychosocial and mental); the implementation of workplace interventions which will prevent ill-health and improve the health of CEs, and; the inter-organizational, intersectoral, and inter-jurisdictional approach to addressing CE health. The program of research will not only build capacity for research on work and health that accounts for sex and gender, given the interdisciplinary training of 3 post-doctoral fellows and 4 graduate students, together with a range of knowledge users and non-academic collaborators, but will simultaneously foster the translation of that research into sex and gender sensitive policies and interventions that improve workers' health via both integrated (iKT) and end-of-project KT strategies